Saturday, 1 December 2012

#4: Starship Traveller

STARSHIP TRAVELLER

Steve Jackson

Reviewed by Mark Lain

Steve Jackson
was always the innovator out of him and Ian Livingstone. Livingstone liked to
develop Titan (well, Allansia) whilst Jackson liked to expand the possibilities
of FF and experiment with it. The first Sci-Fi entry into the FF cannon would
inevitably come from Steve and it came very early on (number 4 in the original
series.)

Sci-Fi and FF
have often been said to make awkward bed-fellows but it has to be said that
very few Sci-Fi FFs ever saw the light of day – there were at most only nine
and that is assuming you view the superhero one (Appointment With F.E.A.R) as Sci-Fi – so it’s hard to fairly judge
their success or failure. The fact that no more were released after number 33 (Sky Lord) suggests that the FF
production team and/or Puffin certainly viewed them as a non-starter and it
doesn’t help that the Sci-Fi FFs were book-ended with two of the worst FF books
ever (Starship Traveller and Sky Lord) as that has hardly helped
their image. Granted, most of the Sci-Fi FFs were poor or pretty lacklustre
(only Robot Commando and Rebel Planet were genuinely good) but we
don’t have much material to go on.

Sadly, Starship Traveller was the first truely
bad FF as it was the first one that’s bad points wildly outweighed any good
points it may have had... and it has many bad points:

·The
sheer amount of time it takes to roll-up all the extra characters and ship
stats would suggest that all these will have some pivotal role to play. This is
not the case. The extra crew are just there to die instead of you and I count
only two ship-to-ship combats. This is very frustrating and is actually a
complete waste of the player’s time.

·The
plethora of extra rules (hand-to-hand combat, phaser combat, ship-to-ship
combat) seem like they will add extra layers to playability and options. This
is not the case. Phaser combat is boring, hand-to-hand combat is just FF
combat, and ship-to-ship combat is practically non-existant (see above.) A
wasted opportunity that makes it hardly worth reading all the extra pages that
explain all these useless rules.

·The
art is two-dimensional and lifeless. Much of it is just line drawings with no
background to immerse you in what you are seeing. Medieval set FFs are easy to
imagine in your mind’s eye as they are close to what we see of our own history,
Sci-Fi is not and needs visualising properly. If this is Space, the
illustrations really convince you that staying on Earth is much more exciting.

·It
is possible to complete the book without touching the dice once. This is just
lame – where is the element of chance that dice-rolling creates? Or, did Steve
deliberately eschew dice-rolling because he knew you would be sick of rolling
dice and had thrown them away in frustration once you’d wasted half an hour
creating all your crew and ship?

·Worst
of all, it comes across very clearly that even Steve got bored with this one
(he has suggested this in interviews) and that he rushed to finish it. He
couldn’t even be bothered to name all the planets! It also doesn’t take long to
reach the end and win, or reach the end and find you have the wrong
co-ordinates. On that note, it took me many attempts to beat this book and I
thought it was really hard until I mapped it and saw how obvious the true path
actually is!

Listing the
book’s good points is a far shorter job and is much harder in that it is so
hard to find any of any real note. Yes, it is basically Star Trek crossed with
the popular Traveller RPG so it gets credit for being savvy enough to jump on
the bandwagon of popular culture at the time. It was a brave effort in that it
was the first attempt to transplant FF’s very Middle Ages-era-centric game
mechanics, but the total lack of any effort to exploit the
futuristically-appropriate extra rules kills that one dead. There’s a certain
amount of curiosity employed when you first start planet-jumping but this is
marred by most of the planets being boring with very little to do or discover
and it wears-off when you realise how soon you will reach the far side of this
particular universe.

The only
neutral aspect of this gamebook is the plot. It does not suffer from the blind
illogicality or ludicrous convolutions of some FF plots and it isn’t totally
one-note like some others. Your ship is sucked through a black hole into an
alien galaxy and you have to find the correct co-ordinates to get back out the
other end and home again. Bizarrely, some planets hide items or information that
you need to use on later planets. This is hard to accept unless they are all
some sort of United States Of Planets. It stretches the point too much but you
can see that it tries to make its galaxy into a conventional dungeon-trawl
where you need something from earlier on to get through something later on,
which may have been done to make it more applicable to the FF conventions.

It is hard to
be positive about ST and it did not
set a good standard for Sci-FI FF. The subsequent one (Space Assassin) is famously just as dire, the next two were
novelties (Freeway Fighter ie Mad
Max, and Rings Of Kether ie Philip
Marlowe in Space), followed by a superhero effort that I can take or leave (Appointment With F.E.A.R.) Not until
number 18 (Rebel Planet) would Sci-Fi
FF find its feet in terms of all-round quality. It’s interesting to note that
the absolute worst Sci-Fi FFs (Starship
Traveller, Space Assassin, Sky Lord) all begin with the letter ‘S’ and that
the best ones (Robot Commando, Rebel
Planet) begin with ‘R’. Spend your time looking for coincidences rather
than wasting it playing this gamebook – it’s much more fun!